Federal information technology executives are slashing millions of dollars in software spending by consolidating contracts and sharing services. But federal executives are targeting even deeper savings, forcing vendors to rethink how they sell and deliver software to the federal government.

E-mail systems, prone to proliferation and notoriously expensive to manage, are often near the top of the list of suspects when state and local government IT executives look for places to cut costs. Indeed, consolidating legacy e-mail systems as a cost-reducing, efficiency-boosting measure is even a matter of law in some jurisdictions.

The international nature of commerce on the Internet means that data (and money) crosses international boundaries in quantities and at speeds not known before to mankind. The days of transactions by mail and paper checks are largely gone

Yesterday I took some time out of my Enterprise Connect schedule and headed to New York to participate in a cloud event held by Navisite, a leading provider of cloud services. The theme of the event was “Cloud: Beyond ROI,” which I thought was a good topic of conversation for anyone considering the cloud.

How are governments planning for and adopting cloud computing? What are the challenges of cloud-enablement? How will the integration of cloud technologies disrupt the status quo of governance? More important, what are governments doing to ensure they get the most from their cloud investments? These are just a few of the questions addressed in this report, which examines the implications of these findings on governments, citizens, cloud service providers and IT leaders.

Cloud computing continues to be a hot topic for organizations, says Entrust's David Rockvam. What issues should be top-of-mind when using the cloud, and how can organizations ensure security? "How you get there is going to be really important," says Rockvam, Entrust's CMO and GM of its Certificate Services business. Whether organizations are outsourcing and using cloud-based applications like Salesforce.com, or putting their own internal applications into the cloud, "You have to make sure you're securing the cloud," Rockvam says in an interview with Information Security Media Group's Tom Field

The federal government and the state of Maryland plan to jointly operate a new cybersecurity laboratory in the cloud and demonstrate the lab's successful findings through social media and mobile apps, according to the Commerce Department. The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence is expected to be physically located in Montgomery County, Md., near the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Gaithersburg headquarters, but it will rely on hardware and software based at remote computer centers in the cloud. The facility will be a place where NIST scientists, industry developers and academic researchers can come together and test security applications for workplace and personal computers, government officials announced in February.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee unveiled a bill to overhaul a decade-old law detailing how federal agencies protect their computer networks from cybersecurity threats.
Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the chairman and ranking member of the committee, respectively, introduced the legislation Monday. The Federal Information Security Amendments Act of 2012 would reestablish the Office of Management and Budget's role — as opposed to the Homeland Security Department's — in developing and overseeing agency cybersecurity guidance.

To say cloud computing is a big trend today is an understatement. There’s not a company I talk to, small or large, that doesn’t have cloud on the mind. While much of the focus on cloud has been on lowering the cost of computing, some organizations I have interviewed recently have been focusing on understanding what cloud enables that traditional computing does not.